cor anglais

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cor anglais is 11 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌkɔːɹ ˈɒŋɡleɪ/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family that is pitched in F, one-fifth lower than the oboe and is consequently approximately one-third longer than the oboe.".

No misspelling variants are generated for cor anglais in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French cor anglais (literally “English horn”), calqued from a misunderstanding of Middle High German engellisches horn (“angelic horn”), from the resemblance of the instrument to horns played by angels as depicted in the Middle Ages. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is cor anglais, spelled C-O-R- -A-N-G-L-A-I-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.